


lightning blasts & scars to prove it

by aerixlee



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Gen, I mean it's Zuko, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Light Angst, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Sort Of, The Gaang Learns How Zuko Got The Scar (Avatar), actually quite a bit of angst looking back, also fluff at the end, how do tags work help, so i’m just going to, violence isn't super graphic but it's still there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27889201
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aerixlee/pseuds/aerixlee
Summary: Zuko comes to a stop in front of Ozai, looking down on his kneeling form. A bitter laugh rises in his throat, because it’s so stupid how the roles have been reversed so quickly, but the memory of Azula’s laughter, wild and uncontrolled and unhinged, everything that she never was, makes him swallow it down.So he just looks at him. And Ozai looks back.Takes place right after Aang and Ozai's battle and the final Agni Kai between Azula and Zuko. The Gaang reunites, and Zuko confronts Ozai.
Relationships: Ozai & Zuko (Avatar), The Gaang & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 68
Kudos: 706





	lightning blasts & scars to prove it

**Author's Note:**

> CW for some descriptions of violence (Agni Kai and child abuse because it's Zuko).  
> Everything is written to be platonic, and there are no romantic interactions, but feel free to read anything into it.
> 
> I wanted to write a fairly brief scene where Zuko confronts Ozai and where the Gaang reunites after everything, so I thought... why not combine the two? It's a nice, healthy balance of light angst and fluff afterwards. Perfect combination.

Never in his life did Zuko think he would be so relieved to see a warship land in the palace courtyard.

He’s standing in the middle of the courtyard, Katara’s arm around him to support part of his weight and keep him steady. He’s still trembling slightly from the lightning blast and from feeling his heart shatter at the sight of Azula sobbing with grief and rage, chained to the grates with blue fire roaring from her mouth. She’d screamed herself into passing out at some point, and her limp body remains hunched over where Katara had left her.

Zuko can’t bring himself to look at her.

“Do you think they’re…” He trails off, glancing at Katara. She looks back at him, and he immediately regrets saying anything.

“We have to hope,” she says, and Zuko nods.

The door to the warship opens. Zuko’s heart clenches in anticipation, and he and Katara rush forward as quickly as they can. Someone’s limping down the rampway, leaning heavily on what looks like a bunch of taped together sticks, his warrior’s wolf tail slightly undone.

“Sokka!” shouts Katara, a huge smile breaking across her face. Tears are welling up in her eyes, and Zuko looks away out of respect for her. But she doesn’t seem to care, even as her smile fades as her eyes land on the crutch.

“Katara!” Sokka limps forward, grinning widely. If Katara weren’t steadying Zuko and Sokka didn’t have a clearly broken leg, Zuko has no doubt that the two of them would’ve crashed into each other’s arms. “You’re alive!”

“What happened?” she asks, staring at his leg with wide eyes. “Tui and La, you shouldn’t be walking at all.”

“I’m fine,” says Sokka dismissively, waving her away. “What about you two? Did you handle Azula?”

Zuko glances over his shoulder at his sister, still unconscious. He looks back at Sokka. “Yeah,” he says, because there’s really nothing else to say. “I screwed up, but Katara saved the battle.”

Katara whirls on him, almost sending both of them off balance. “Shut up,” she snaps. “Don’t you _dare_ say that. You jumped in front of lightning for me. I shouldn’t have been standing out there in the first place, but you--”

“Whoa, whoa, _what?_ ” Sokka holds up his hands. His eyes go wide as his gaze lands on the charred fabric of Zuko’s tunic and at the pink, burned flesh beneath. A queasy sort of look melts over his features. “You jumped in front-- Your sister shot _lightning_ at you?”

Zuko shrugs. "At Katara, not me," he says. "But it's not the first time a family member has done that. Hopefully the last."

“What--”

Then there’s a noise in the depths of the warship, effectively stopping the conversation. But judging by the sharp, calculated look on Sokka’s face as he turns back around, the kind of look he gets in battle strategy and intense sparring matches, it isn’t the end of their talk.

“What about Aang?” asks Zuko. “Toph, Suki?”

“They’re inside,” says Sokka, jerking his thumb behind him. “They’ll be out soon. But they’re alive and unharmed, if that’s what you’re asking. They didn’t get struck by lightning or have a broken leg, at least.”

“I’m looking at that the moment you sit down,” threatens Katara, glaring at him. Sokka flinches back, dramatically flailing his arms at her.

“Geez, okay!”

There’s a pause. No one comes out of the warship.

Zuko wonders if Ozai is in there, whether as a body or as a prisoner. He wonders which possibility he would be more comforted by, if either.

“So, did he…” Katara trails off, looking at Sokka, and Zuko knows she’s going to voice the same question that he has even before she continues. “Did he do it?”

She doesn’t need to elaborate.

Sokka hesitates. He glances over his shoulder, then steps aside. Or hops, as he’s still leaning heavily on the makeshift crutch he must’ve put together in the warship. “It’s probably best if you just see for yourself,” he says.

Katara exchanges a quizzical look with Zuko. Her arm is still around him. He’s grateful for her presence, and he smiles slightly at her. She smiles back, the exhaustion and anxiety clear in her eyes.

As if on cue, Aang emerges from the warship. Katara lets out a strangled cry of relief and joy, but she doesn’t let go of Zuko. He’s about to say something to her, tell her that she doesn’t have to worry about him and should go hug him, but the words already forming in his mouth die immediately as his eyes catch on another movement at the entrance to the warship.

Suki and Toph. The same overwhelming relief floods over Zuko at the sight of their faces, just as it did with everyone else. Their expressions are tired and grim, but alive, mercifully _alive_. He wants to run up and hug them both, but even if he was the kind of person to initiate things like that, he’s not in any shape to be having that kind of full-front physical contact, and he has a feeling Katara would literally murder him if he tried to move.

But they all made it out alive. By some impossible miracle, every single one of them is alive.

Then his eyes land on the limp body Suki’s holding by the collar. His heart drops into his stomach. He hears Katara inhale sharply, suddenly, and feels her hand tighten where it rests against his arm.

“Is that…” she begins. And Zuko doesn’t even know how to respond, doesn’t even know how to feel, because he recognizes that hair, those hands, those arms, those legs, from kneeling at the man’s feet, from being hit and burned, from growing up in the palace filled with fear at the sight of the person meant to protect him.

He can feel something building in his throat. He’s not sure if it’s a scream or a sob or just _nothing._ And he doesn’t get to find out, because then the body lifts its head, and Ozai’s gold eyes, the same color as Zuko’s, meet his son’s unflinchingly.

_He’s alive._

Zuko feels himself stiffen, unable to look away. His mind is completely blank, the only sound his heart thudding in his ears, slamming against the walls of his ribcage. Somehow, he hadn’t pictured this moment during his relentless worrying over the battle.

“He’s alive,” he says quietly, so quietly that he doesn’t know if even Katara can hear him. But she does, and she looks at him with such concern that he almost wants to throw her arm off of him, but he doubts he would be able to balance without her here, and spirits _,_ why can’t he just get a hold of himself?

“You--” His eyes go to the ropes tied around Ozai, binding his arms behind his back, and a horrible thrum of panic runs through him. He looks at Suki and Toph in disbelief. “You can’t tie him with _ropes_ ; he’ll burn through them.”

His voice is trembling slightly, but he doesn’t think anyone else hears. To an outsider’s ears, to anyone but himself, he sounds cold, detached.

“Don’t worry, Sparky,” Toph says, grinning, but it doesn’t quite reach her eyes, and all Zuko can think is _she’s twelve she’s twelve she’s twelve,_ and why is _she_ telling _him_ not to worry? “Aang handled it.”

“I took his bending away,” Aang says, and he sounds slightly nervous, and it occurs to Zuko that he’s also twelve; he’s the Avatar and he’s twelve years old, and this twelve year old found a way around taking a man’s life. He’s watching Zuko carefully, clearly waiting for a reaction, but Zuko doesn’t know if he has one to give. For the first time in years, his mind feels completely devoid of any thoughts, any emotions. He is no longer the raging, angry teenager chasing a legend and his honor; no longer the laughing, innocent child running through the halls of the palace with burn marks hidden beneath his sleeves; no longer the boy kneeling at his father’s feet, a scream ripping from his throat, while tears and melted skin drip to the stone floor below. He is all of these things, he is none of these things, and he doesn’t know what he is anymore.

“He can’t firebend?” he asks, and his voice sounds so far away. He doesn’t know how loudly he says it, but Aang nods, so he must’ve heard.

“Where’d you to do learn that?” asks Katara in wonder.

“A lion turtle, apparently” says Sokka, shaking his head. “I still think that he’s lying.”

_He took his bending away._

Where there used to be nothing, there is now too much, far too much to handle at once. Memories of a strong, firm hand gripping his arm, of a pair of golden eyes burning into his matching pair, come flooding back all at once with the phantom feeling of heat building on his skin. He remembers sneaking into the doctor’s room to steal jars of burn cream when his father went too far. He remembers sticking his freshly burned arms into the turtleduck pond when no one was watching once he was sure his father had gone. He remembers that Agni Kai. He remembers, he remembers, he remembers, and now his father’s bending is gone.

Zuko shrugs Katara’s arm off of him. She starts to say something, but one look from Zuko causes her to fall silent. The anxious look on her face stays, her eyebrows furrowed.

He steps forward a little unsteadily. He approaches Ozai, still uncertain of what he’s doing or what his intentions are. Aang is watching with huge eyes, and Zuko momentarily wonders if he thinks that he’s going to kill him, wonders if Aang is going to intervene, but he doesn’t move. Zuko wonders if he’ll stop him if he does.

_He shouldn’t have to. He’s twelve years old. None of this should’ve happened._

Zuko comes to a stop in front of Ozai, looking down on his kneeling form. A bitter laugh rises in his throat, because it’s so _stupid_ how the roles have been reversed so quickly, but the memory of Azula’s laughter, wild and uncontrolled and unhinged, everything that she never was, makes him swallow it down.

So he just looks at him. And Ozai looks back.

He wonders if he’s thinking the same thing that he is. Is this how his father felt when he stood above his kneeling son as he begged for mercy? He doubts it, somehow.

“Do you regret it?” Zuko finds himself asking. His voice is steady, almost alarmingly so. He sounds too calm for the circumstances, and he can hear Sokka murmur something to Katara behind him, but he ignores them.

“Do I regret what?” sneers Ozai. His voice is raw but somehow retains that familiar regal, scathing quality that Zuko is so used to flinching away from.

But no more.

“Burning me,” Zuko says flatly. He’s aware, too aware, of everyone listening carefully, of the disbelieving looks he can feel them exchanging, but he can’t find the energy to wait for this conversation to happen. He’s been waiting for too long, even if he didn’t know it. And if his friends guess how he got his scar… Well, they certainly could've found out in less favorable circumstances. “All of those times when I was young. The Agni Kai. Do you regret any of that?”

The question is selfish. But there will be time for selflessness later.

Ozai laughs, and it doesn’t sound anything like Azula’s. It is cruel, it is calculated, it is measured, and it sounds exactly like the laugh that he let out at the Day of Black Sun. Zuko, in the corner of his eye, can see Suki swap an uncertain glance with Aang, but, still, no one says anything.

Zuko wonders if his father will answer him at all.

“No,” says Ozai at last, eyes narrowing, and Zuko _hates_ how much he looks like him, right down to the cut of his cheekbones and the line of his jaw. “You deserved it all. I was teaching you a lesson each of those times, a lesson that you repeatedly failed to learn. A lesson that Azula failed to learn,” he adds, lip curling.

“You--” Katara starts forward, but Sokka pulls her back. Zuko doesn’t take his eyes off of his father.

“You failed us,” he says, and this time, his voice shakes slightly. An image of his sister, screaming and writhing against the chains binding her, flashes across his vision, and it takes everything in him not to run over to her and hug her tightly. “You were supposed to protect us. You were supposed to care for us, love us. You were supposed to act like a father. But you didn’t.”

“And I don’t regret it,” snarls Ozai.

Zuko can’t say that he didn’t expect that. But it hurts nonetheless.

And maybe that’s okay.

He spent so long thinking that what his father did to him over the course of his childhood and on that stage was justified. He knows, now, that that couldn’t have been further from the truth. But he spent even longer struggling with the fact that he _still_ craves his father’s approval, still craves his love, still craves everything that he never gave to him. I t’s only now, standing in front of the man himself, that he realizes that _that’s okay._ He might never stop feeling that way. And that’s not his fault.

What matters is that he knows that everything Ozai did was wrong, and that, in the end, Zuko made the right choices and will continue to strive to make the right choices. And as long as he knows that, as long as he stays certain in that knowledge, he is safe from his father’s manipulation.

And he will do everything in his power to make sure that Azula is safe, too.

Zuko reaches out. His right hand cups his father’s face in a gesture bordering on tender, just as his father's had been that day, and it’s almost big enough to stretch over the entirety of that side of his face. He feels something clench in his stomach, because there are only three years between that day and today, but his hand is _almost_ big enough, and Ozai’s hand was so much larger than his whole face on that day.

He feels his father stiffen beneath his hand.

Zuko isn’t even shaking.

He hears someone inhale sharply behind him, hears someone step forward as though to stop him, and he knows that they’re all watching, tensed, ready to pull him back if they have to. But that isn’t his intention.

“I could do it,” he says quietly. It’s meant just for his father, but everyone hears it. “I could do it now, and you wouldn’t be able to stop me. You’re just as defenseless as I was that day.”

He looks at Ozai for a moment longer. For a brief, horrible moment, he considers letting his hand erupt into flames, but it only lasts for a heartbeat, and he pushes it down immediately, overwhelmed with disgust.

“You’ll rot in a cell far beneath the palace for the rest of your life,” he says softly. “You’ll never see Agni’s light again. And maybe, _maybe_ , you’ll regret what you did eventually. To me, to Azula, to mother. To the world.”

Zuko releases his father’s face and turns away.

“You are no son of mine!” he hears his father shout behind him, because he always has to have the last word, and Zuko feels a small, grim smile twitch on the corner of his lips, because it used to be frightening, but now it’s pitiful. “You are a coward, a dishonorable _child--_ ”

“Oh, shut up,” snaps Toph. There’s a loud thud, and Zuko turns just in time to see Ozai topple over. Suki doesn’t move to pick him up. Toph smashes the alarmingly large rock back into the ground. "What a sore loser."

“He’s not dead, is he?” asks Sokka, once the dust settles. He waves his hand in the air a few times in an exaggerated motion. “After everything Aang went through to make sure that he _didn’t_ die, it’d kind of suck if he died here.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” mutters Suki.

Suddenly, everyone’s looking at Zuko. He would say that he doesn’t know why, but… he knows exactly why.

For seemingly no reason, tears start to well up in Zuko’s eyes. It’s a mixture of relief that his friends are alive, an odd sense of catharsis from his words with his father, and exhaustion, sheer exhaustion, because they just won a war and there’s so much left to be done. He quickly blinks them away before anyone can see.

Then, suddenly, Aang runs up to him and practically tackles him into a hug.

Zuko stumbles back, caught off balance from the sudden weight and the pain flaring over his wound, and Katara rushes over to steady him. And then she’s hugging him, too, and Zuko’s standing there at a complete loss for what to do, because he has two people hugging him, and what is the appropriate reaction to something like that? How are you supposed to hug more than one person at once?

But then Toph is running towards them, and Suki is helping Sokka over, and then all of them are hugging each other, and someone must’ve fallen at some point because now they’re all on the ground, clutching each other like lifelines, and Zuko feels like he’s back in the North Pole, floating in the icy water with nothing but a wooden raft to keep everything afloat, and someone starts crying, and Zuko still isn’t sure if he was the one to start or not, but then everyone’s crying, and it doesn’t matter anymore. Zuko has a coronation to deal with, a nation to delicately stitch back together, a sister to coax back to reality, a father to imprison, a mother to find, and a lightning blast shaped like a star burned in the middle of his body to heal.

But that can all wait. The world can wait for just five more minutes. Because they’re all here. And they’re all alive.

And that’s all that matters.

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to comment and let me know what you thought <3
> 
> Ahhh I hope I did everything right! It's my first time posting here, and it took me ages to figure out what I was doing. But if you're reading this, I figured it out, got a hold of my anxieties, and took the plunge!
> 
> Follow me on [Tumblr](https://aerixlee.tumblr.com/) for updates or just to chat!


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